Antonio Cangiano:

In theory I could have been disappointed. After all, my visit didn’t fix the problem at hand, my expensive laptop seemed to be good as a door stopper, and repairing this thing could potentially be less advantageous than just buying a newer unit. Yet, as I arrived home, I told my wife that my next laptop would definitely be an Apple.

The reason for this is that I saw a genuine effort to help me out, an unheard level of care for the customer and an willingness to do what’s right, even if it costs the company some money. The whole experience was very positive and I felt that the premium cost of Apple’s products is easily justified by this kind of support.

The way you support your clients is a key part of any products and services your company provides. No matter how much you focus on quality, things will go wrong sometimes and your clients will have problems. Ironically, that’s your biggest chance to make them a fan for live because while people expect products to work all the time, they don’t expect support experiences to be much good. If you provide a great support experience, it surprises them and makes them notice.

Two examples I’ve had recently really confirm that.  The first was with one of Ephox’s clients who were experiencing a lot of crashes. It had reached the point where the authors were unable to do any work and the content migration had pretty much completely stopped – their project timeline was dead in the water. Thankfully, they were extremely patient and friendly people so even in such a stressful time were really good to work with and I made sure I dropped everything and worked whatever hours were required to solve their problems. Most importantly though, I gave them copious status updates to make sure they knew exactly what was going on and give them the information that their bosses were going to ask for. We’ve solved the major issues and are still working to clean up some more minor issues, but they’ve already offered to give us a reference.

The second case was with a Freecom Tough Drive I bought. It’s meant to be powered off the USB bus, but PowerBook G4s don’t supply enough power that way so the one I bought for my wife has sat in the drawer for quite a while. Recently though our regular backup drive failed so I really needed to get it working. Turns out they’ll ship you a free power adapter if you need it, you just have to email them. I did, and got a response within about 30 minutes to say the adapter would be in the mail asap. Needless to say, I’m seriously impressed and will be sticking with Freecom for any portable hard drives I need in the future.

It’s easy to think of support as a cost centre for your business and something that should be outsourced, but the reality is that it’s one of the best opportunities for impressing your clients, building great word of mouth and perhaps most importantly, getting real world feedback on your products so you can make them better in the future.